Myth of Shakespeare

A Myth of Shakespeare is a verse drama by Charles Williams, published by Oxford University Press in 1930, in which Shakespeare himself becomes a character. Williams was then working as an editor at the Press, and the play belongs to the early part of his career as poet, critic, and dramatist, before the novels and the theological writing for which he is better known. It is neither a biography nor a scholarly argument about the plays. Williams called it a myth, and the word is exact: he is not recording what happened to Shakespeare but imagining what the making of the plays might mean.

The drama runs through the vocabulary Williams loved, in which a person's vocation is bound up with the persons around him. Shakespeare appears as a man pulled between the imaginative life that consumes him and the claims of those who love him, between the poet's task and the ordinary obligations of marriage, friendship, and household. The play does not treat art as a refuge from the human, nor the human as an obstacle to art. It asks what the artist owes to others and what others owe to the work, and it shows how a gift can be both burden and grace. Williams writes in verse that is plain and spare rather than ornamental, and the imitation of Shakespeare's manner is deliberately restrained. The weight falls on the questions the story raises about love, imagination, and the cost of making.

The play matters now chiefly as an early expression of themes that run through all of Williams's later work: that the created order is glimpsed through particular human relationships, that love and vocation cannot be separated, and that the imagination is a place where moral and spiritual realities become visible. Readers of the later novels, the Arthurian poetry, and The Figure of Beatrice will find here an earlier statement of concerns that he developed over the following fifteen years. It also stands as an example of how a Christian writer of the interwar period approached literature as a form of spiritual attention instead of as pious illustration.

Who should read this: readers who already know Williams and want to see where his central convictions first took dramatic shape, and those interested in how Christian writers of his generation thought about artistic calling. It is not for anyone looking for a historically grounded life of Shakespeare, nor for readers who want Williams's theology stated directly. It is a poetic drama, and it asks to be read slowly, as poetry.